At least in the history of the modern world, high brow forms of art and culture evolved out of popular forms of entertainment. Every genre came to provide deep feelings and insights into the nature of life, those experiences presented in a beguiling way: with suspense, or local color, or characters worth noticing. The modern drama from Shakespeare through Genet, for example, was propelled out of the biblical plays performed in the English countryside and in churches, those allegorical and simplified dramas showing their abiding presence in the tragic comedies of the theatre of the absurd and, in America, in the moralizing of O’Neill and Williams who, in spite of the depth of character they also provided, constructed dramatic arcs through which people got their just deserts, just as had been true in ”Everyman”. But that process of high culture growing from popular culture, and not just in the theatre, had not been apparent during the two cultural periods known as “Modernism” (circa 1895-1938) and “The Age of Anxiety” (circa 1938-1968) because of the predominance of the elitist or experimental novel, like those of Joyce and Kafka, and the paintings of, for example, Picasso and Rothko, the literature and art inaccessible to the popular reader and viewer, and so we are likely to still think that the present cultural period, known as “Contemporary” or “Postmodern” is, like its two predecessor periods, elitist in origin, when in fact all of these periods were ones in which culture had its roots in the popular culture rather than in top down culture.
Novels are unlike drama in that they grew out of early Eighteenth Century reportage about strange events in strange places. That is the endeavor Defoe engaged in early on. They evolved quickly enough into histories of families, which were portraits of life not usually seen except from the inside and so as strange as any adventure that took place far from home. The greatness of the Nineteenth Century novel in English was that it detailed courtship and other family relationships in a detail that would be scandalous if it were about real life people, the novel therefore a kind of scandal sheet not that far removed from the broadsheets of Defoe’s time, and yet dealt out with such subtlety and elaboration of heartfelt emotions that novels seemed truer to life than life itself. Everyone can become a Janeite however impossible it is for anyone but Austen to capture all that much of life. Yes, novels have their arcs: Pip’s bildungsroman, Oliver Twist’s rescue from infamy, Becky Sharp growing into nobility, Ahab’s appointment with death, but the thing is that the plot isn’t the thing; the thing is the strange country, whether a manor house or a wilderness, a career or a love affair, that gets explored.
The movies, as Eisenstadt pointed out, are descended from the novel, shifting the tone and story that is being unfolded, first one then the other, sometimes relating a moment in close up and sometimes in a long sweeping shot that makes it a breathtakingly different experience. Chaplin’s “Modern Times” is intimate when the tramp deals with the blind girl, grand and majestic when it portrays factory life. The nickelodeon becomes high art, it is often said, in that banner year 1939, which saw “Stagecoach”, “The Wizard of Oz”, and “Gone With the Wind”, all still true to the idea of giving sensation first and then, perhaps only upon reconsideration, the rewards of art: a sense of existential plight and agony, of a differently conceived pattern of visual elements, of high moral purpose, all very different than early shoot-em up westerns or heavy handed Joan Crawford melodramas. The high point seems to me to come a quarter century later with “Godfather I” and “Godfather II”, where Coppola unites more successfully than before or later the visual and the verbal, the interchanges brief and profound, while the settings do the work of explaining the spirit of the time, all the way to the period accuracy of the folding chairs around a wind swept pool at one of the casinos to which Michael is always returning because that has become the center of his industry. What a mean way for a gangster to end up! Is that the end of Michael as the backside of a billboard was the end for Edward G. Robinson’s Ricco?
The movies, however, are unlike the novel in that the novel became attenuated what with its withdrawal into being only a literary class experience, the rest of the popular reading public moving to mystery stories or to the movies and what followed after that. What is remarkable is how quickly, which means within a generation, technological innovations turned into art forms. Within a generation of the invention of photography, there were artistic renderings of landscape in France and battlefield photography during the American Civil War. Within a generation of the invention of film, distributors cleaning out lofts and department stores so as to show their wares, there were the comic masterpieces of the young Charlie Chaplin and the epics of D. W. Griffith.
TV formats, for their part, grew out of combining a number of the then popular arts. Vaudeville may have been dead and buried by the early Fifties, but it's comedians, such as Ed Wynn and Jimmy Durante, lingered on and were part of “The Colgate Comedy Hour” on NBC, and Ed Sullivan, whose “Toast of the Town” had the same time slot on CBS, hired jugglers and magicians and comedians to be up on stage to do ten minutes or less of standup and then get off the stage. Television comedy was derived from its radio antecedents, such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny, and “I Love Lucy” was born from the films that Lucille Ball had made when she was in Hollywood in the late Thirties. Television drama’s pedigree was the realistic Broadway theatre of the Thirties and Forties, which was only a slightly more elevated form of entertainment, and it produced writers like Paddy Chayevsky, who made it in Hollywood, and Horton Foote, who became a very highly regarded playwright, he moving up in class to a middle brow form, the American theatre, backed, as that was, by the very long lineage of world theatre. And the distinctive things about television were also borrowed from established popular forms: the late night talk show from radio, where a disc jockey could go on and on for hours, interrupting his patter with music, and the news coverage of breaking events, such as the Kennedy Assasination, where television journalists like Walter Cronkite had played the same role on radio and less so as print correspondents, which was regarded as a much more respectable vocation.
The fine arts do not violate my proposition. Yes, Abstract Expressionism, the art of the Age of Anxiety, was elitist in that ordinary viewers of art saw it and the Modernism that came before as totally unapproachable, even well educated people saying Abstract Expressionism was something children or apes could put together. But that ended with Andy Warhol, who was always a popular artist. Remember that his Factory was known for the fact that he could produce many copies of his silk screen processed representations of soup cans or Mao photographs, often in slightly different tints, and so each of them a separate artistic creation for which a high price might be expected. You are in the age of mechanical reproduction that Walter Benjamin, writing in the Thirties, foretold. Contemporary art, for its part, is easy to assimilate in that it turns car crashes and newsreels into art by declaring it to be so, even if I find that to require deadening the viewer’s aesthetic sensibilities. Is that all there is to art?
It is very hard, however, to demonstrate the proposition that elevating a previously only popular form of culture into being high brow culture results in quality art. Consider comic books, a form of popular culture once derided as the cause of juvenile delinquency. It did not provide new inspiration for the movies even though it has proven very good for the box office. Instead, older fashion movie making goes on, and so the quality of this year’s “serious” films, usually released just in time for Academy Award season, is Martin Scorcese’s “The Irishman” which, despite it being a reworking of “Goodfellas”, has a lot of fresh material, both visually and thematically. Movie art has not evolved beyond what it was in the Seventies, despite the infusion of comic books.
But neither does the lack of new popular cultural forms and content allow an extant form to renew itself from within. The novel seems to have bogged down after its experimental stage in the early Twentieth Century when strange voices and shapes were introduced into its stories by Kafka and Faulkner and Joyce and Nabakov so the mechanisms for exploring strange worlds, those worlds themselves more important than whatever spectacular adventures were therein recounted. Rather, we have settled into the Henry James mode of examining very closely the psychological dynamics of a set of characters and so don’t much care how the plot turns out so long as we are in touch with how the author imagines people interact with their sense of themselves as well as with others. This descent, which is what I would call it, was put off for a generation by Updike and Roth who, despite their own grounding in James, had subject matters of their own, and a keen sense of irony, Roth given to dramatic like reversals and Updike to characters two faced both to the reader and to themselves. The nurturing fluid for the novel runs thin, for example, in Robert Russo, despite his way with describing geography, and in Alan Hollinghurst, despite his own gift for describing settings and for attempting Austen-like conversation. The lives of which they tell are not rendered strange but merely provincial. Everybody is Madame Bovary and we are all diminished by that.